How Notre Dame Got Creative, Innovative To Navigate Unusual Recruiting Year
Kahanu Kia essentially pushed Notre Dame to offer with a tweet.
On Aug. 22, past 3 a.m. ET, the three-star linebacker from Honolulu's Punahou High School sent out a 54-second video of him in his yard — maybe 250 square feet and illuminated only by streetlight — putting on his own individual workout.
Backpedals into sprints forward. Hip-flipping into coverage. Stutter steps and shuffles. Anything a linebacker would do in a camp where college coaches or recruiting analysts could watch.
Those didn’t happen this year. Kia’s homemade one, though, was enough to nudge Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish coaches had seen his junior season film and were impressed. The improvised individual workout opened eyes further. The staff wanted to offer. But there was still the hurdle of never having sized him up in person.
“We were watching this guy move, talking to our friends at Punahou and saying, ‘Measure him for me,’” Notre Dame recruiting coordinator Brian Polian said. “I want to know exactly how tall he is, what he weighs right now. We had to do that across the board.”
This is recruiting in 2020.
Notre Dame offered Kia eight days after he tweeted the video. On Nov. 19, after he and his family trekked more than 4,000 miles for a self-funded, self-guided campus tour, Kia committed to the Irish. He was one of 26 December Irish signees. The whole process went down with zero in-person interaction and sans any official visits.
Enterprising tales like Kia’s D.I.Y. scouting combine are abundant across college football in this year of recruiting gripped by COVID-19. As it stands now, the NCAA dead period banning in-person recruiting of any kind runs through April 15, 2021. It began last March. That’s a year of no camp evaluations, no official visits and record speeds to reach Zoom platinum status.
The answer was not to shrug and write off a class. Demand for recruits remained. Recruits’ interest in college football did, too. Finding the right matches between player and school just required jumping through a few more hoops.
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